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In a case profiled here in October, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling this week reversing the conviction of Antoine Jones. The case held the potential to drastically alter the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, but due to the very narrow grounds the Court based its ruling on, many of the issues related to warrantless electronic monitoring of suspects has been left to future cases.

While the Fourth Amendment may seem technical or scholastic to some, the meaning of the right to be secure in one’s person and possessions has far-reaching effects in most criminal cases. The charges the State brings against a defendant, whether murder charges or drug possession, almost always implicate the Fourth Amendment. Our experienced Annapolis drug possession attorneys have the knowledge and understanding of the Fourth Amendment necessary to protect our clients’ rights.

The Supreme Court held that the case was a “classic trespassory search” within the meaning originally provided by the framers of the Fourth Amendment, because of the nature of the police’s action: “[t]he Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information.”. The earliest case law on the Fourth Amendment only addressed violations of privacy that involved physical trespass. For example, in Olmstead v. United States, decided in 1928, the Court held that there was no Fourth Amendment violation when a wiretap was attached to telephone wires on public streets; without a physical trespass to an individual’s property or person, there was no search.

The Court altered its analysis of what a Fourth Amendment search was in Katz v. United States, a 1967 case in which a listening device was placed on the outside of a public telephone booth. With that case, the Court expanded the protections of the Fourth Amendment to include more than situations where there was a physical trespass to a person or his or her property. Under Katz, a Fourth Amendment violation occurred when the police violated an individual’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The Katz decision did not, however, get rid of the restrictions on traditional “trespassory” searches.

Thus, applied to this case, the Court held that the police’s action in placing the GPS tracking device on Jones’ vehicle constituted a Fourth Amendment search because there was a physical trespass to his property. Because the police did not have a valid warrant at the time they placed the tracking device, they violated the Fourth Amendment, and the Court reversed Jones’ conviction.

What is perhaps most interesting to this decision is what it did not decide. Justice Scalia, along with Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Kennedy joined, provided what is considered to be the majority opinion, because Justice Sotomayor concurred with the opinion. Justice Sotomayor suggested that she wished the majority had expanded its opinion, pointing out that “[i]n cases of electronic or other novel modes of surveillance that do not depend upon a physical invasion on property, the majority opinion’s trespassory test may provide little guidance.”Continue reading

Next month, in a case that has multiple connections to the State of Maryland, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral argument over whether the prolonged, warrantless use of a GPS tracking device is an unreasonable search precluded by the 4th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The case, United States v. Jones, could have far-reaching effects on the government’s ability to track its citizens without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause.

In Jones, the DC police department obtained a warrant to place a GPS device on Jones’ Jeep, but the police installed the GPS device after the warrant had expired, and while the Jeep was in Maryland, outside of the jurisdiction of the DC court that authorized the warrant. The police thereafter tracked Jones’ movements for a month, including his visits to a suspected “stash house” in Fort Washington, Maryland. Based in part on the evidence obtained from the GPS tracking, Jones, an owner of a DC nightclub, was convicted of conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute over 5kg of cocaine, and over 50g of cocaine base.

The closest Supreme Court precedent to the issue before the Court is United States v. Knotts. In that case, the police placed a radio transmitter in a container of ether, and tracked the movements of an individual from a location in Minnesota to a secluded cabin in Wisconsin. The Supreme Court held that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy while driving on public roads, and thus the monitoring of those movements did not constitute a search.

The Circuit Court for the District of Columbia held that the tracking of Jones movements for an entire month constituted a search that implicated the 4th Amendment’s protections, despite the ruling of the Supreme Court in Knotts. The Circuit Court reasoned that the aggregation of an entire month’s worth of Jones’ movement was distinguishable from the tracking of a discrete trip that the Supreme Court considered in Knotts. The Court acknowledged that whether an expectation of privacy is reasonable depends in large part upon whether the “private” information has been exposed to the public, and that when an individual drives on a public road, his or her activities are “public.” The court nevertheless determined that “to track Jones’s movements 24 hours a day for 28 days as he moved among scores of places, thereby discovering the totality and pattern of his individual movements from place to place to place,” was distinct from merely tracking his “movements from one place to another.” As the Court stated, “the whole of one’s movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil.” In other words, even if all of the movements were in public, an individual can reasonably expect that his or her movements are not all being tracked by the government by way of a hidden device on his or her vehicle.Continue reading

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